"Asymmetry" A Stunning Debut Novel that is Demanding and Rewarding by Lisa Hadley

"Asymmetry" attempts & accomplished an innovative structure within literary fiction.  Lisa Hadley (b Amer) assembles a jarring juxtaposition of two distinct tales whose narrative tangents are complex, compelling and highly rewarding.  Hadley managed to create a debut novel that resonates with the brilliance of Philip Roth's writing style & plot while interjecting a distinct middle section "Madness".  At first this is maddening for its interruption of the captivating & irksome love story between the significantly older Ezra and Mary-Alice with the narrative of Amar (an American of Iraqi heritage).  Ezra (Roth's doppelgänger) is a lecherous, narcissistic writer whose grandiose is supported by having received numerous elite literary awards.  Ezra shares Roth's bio of Jewish heritage, agnostic beliefs and harping of bodily ails befitting aging.   Ezra battles his physical decline by maintaining his writing acumen & seducing a sexual relationship with a woman 1/2 his age.  Mary-Alice (a nod to writer Mary Alice Monroe) is an underling editor with literary ambitions.  Ezra brandishes his literary clout to commit "Alice" to a clandestine sexual liaison.  Despite Ezra's selfish & boorish demands the relationship morphs towards a symbiotic connection of affection.  At which point "Madness" takes up the narrative of Amar who is being detained at a London airport where he wished to visit a war correspondent friend before flying to visit his family in Iraq.  Amar was issued both an American & Iraqi passport due to his birth in midair betwixt the 2 countries.  While Amar awaits approval to enter the UK we learn of his life which has straddled an American upbringing with its ease & privileges with his years in the Middle East of violence, turbulence & unforeseeable future.  Hadley's instinctual & intelligent storytelling for such diverse characters and circumstances confuse & compel the reader to draw sensible comparisons.  The unifying theme underlying the novellas within the novel all succumb to shifting dynamics of power whether it be in relationships of love or the atrocities of war whose aim is to command control.   It's in Part III which returns to Ezra during an interview by a young female journalist with his intent to initiate an affair that the ephiphanies between inequitable individuals or sovereignties between nations are made lucid. Ezra tells his fawning interviewer "To forge patterns and proportions where they don't actually exist.  And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess-this necessary folly-that sparks and sustains love."  Amar's realizations regarding the perpetual military conflicts in the Middle East and America's seeming indifferent are "After all, humility and silence are surely preferable to ignorance and imperiousness.  And maybe East and West really are eternally irreconcilable-like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect."  Hadley's remarkable "Asymmetry" has ingeniously & artistically constructed a dissected work "that each on its own had the purity and resonance of a respectable instrument; only in combination did they jar and jam."  Hadley has achieved what Ezra intended with writing; struggling to force meaningful convergence with ravishing prose.